Fort Madison Pivot Bridge

We drove over to Nauvoo (Illinois) for dinner one night and got caught by the bridge opening up. This happens several times a day. Wikipedia says 2,000 times a year, which works out to about 6 times a day. On the other hand there are upwards of 75 trains a day crossing the bridge and traversing the length of Fort Madison every day. Going to the marina you are almost certain to get held up by a train.

Towboat

Bridge in action
Update August 2019 replace Picasa slideshow with photo and link to Google Photos album.

Boat Ride

While I was in Fort Madison (Iowa) Andy & I took his boat out for a cruise on the Mississippi. They have a really big pivot bridge there. Fortunately, if we take the antennae down we are low enough to slide under it without them having to open it up.

We went up the river about five or six miles and found a little inlet to hide out it. We turned off the motor and I took a nap. When I woke up we were up against the shore. Andy told me we had drifted up and down the river a couple of hundred yards in each direction. The current wasn't very strong where we were, and the breeze was blowing upstream, so the current would carry us down, and then the breeze would blow us back up.

Sacred Heart Church, Grand Rapids Michigan

Sacred Heart Church

Supposedly I was baptized here, and an old friend of the family is very involved, so it made sense to stop by and say hello. Very impressive, very ornate, though the outside is made out of very practical bricks and not grandiose blocks of stone. It has a predominately Polish clientelle. There was a big celebration going on in the basement when I stopped by, with food, drinks, a band and a big crowd. At first I thought it was a Mexican band, they had a couple of trumpets and they were singing in a foreign language, and that would be the norm in Hillsboro, but in Grand Rapids it's Polish. Same kind of upbeat music as I have come to expect from Mexican bands.

Update April 2021 replaced dead Picasa photos with single image and link to Google Photos album.

Parallel Landing

When we were coming into the Minneapolis-St.Paul airport I noticed another aircraft apparently hanging in the air off to our left. I imagine it was actually flying, but it was going noticeably slower than we are. This airport has two main, parallel runways, and there are always multiple aircraft queued up for landing in both lanes.

Restaurants & Hotels

On my last night in Columbus an old friend took me out for dinner at La Hacienda Real, a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant was nice, the prices were reasonable (less than $30 for two, including drinks), and it was delicious.

It's on Sinclair near Morse Road, in between a "Motel 6" and an "America's Best Value Inn", where I spent my last night. I don't know about it being a "Best Value", though it was cheaper than "The Place" in Newark ($53 versus $80). The thing I really noticed was the carpets. The carpet at "The Place" actually felt clean enough to walk on it barefoot. The carpet at the "Best Value" place turned the soles of my feet black. Didn't feel none too clean either.

Licking County Courthouse

Unlike the old jail, the courthouse is still in use. The older buildings on the square around the courthouse are barely hanging on, but the courthouse looks like it is going to be there forever.

Licking County Courthouse

How did they ever build such an elaborate building?

Update December 2025 replaced missing Picasa image.

A Tisket, A Tasket ...

Longaberger Picnic Basket Building

Longaberger company.

Update December 2025 replace missing Picasa image.

Licking County Jail

I am out walking around downtown Newark (Ohio) a couple of weeks ago and I spy this huge black stone edifice.

Boy, did that bring back memories. I knew a guy who got locked up there many years ago. I stopped in to visit once. Went up the stairs to his floor, and at the landing there was a grill-like door. It was locked. Three or four feet farther in there was another door. As I recall, both doors had bars, like you would expect in a jail, but at least one of them was covered with a couple layers of different size mesh. The biggest opening would accommodate a pencil. I heard a story that a visitor had managed to smuggle some smokes into the jail by putting them inside straws and then hooking the straws together, end-to-end, by slipping the end of one straw inside the end of the next. By this method he was able to create a pole about four feet long that he was able to feed through the screen to his partner on the inside. What won't those kids think of next?

Kind of reminds me of something out of Harry Potter, except the sun is shining. I wonder what kind of stone is black, and whether the choice was intentional? Probably. Did not find anything on the net.

Green, Green Grass

I really lucked out on my trip to the Midwest. The weather was "simply marvelous, darling"*. I had been expecting 90 degrees Fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity and what I got was 75 to 80 degrees. At those temperatures the humidity doesn't matter too much. It was basically just like the summer weather we normally have in the Willamette Valley in Oregon.

Meanwhile at home they were having a heat wave. Temperatures got up to 105 for a while. Glad I wasn't here.

There were a couple of things I noticed while driving through the Midwest. There were the things you kind of expect, like lots of fields and farms, and the land is basically flat from here to forever. But then there were things that stuck out as being really different, and one of these was the huge lawns of green grass.

Oregon has these land use laws, which basically means they are trying to contain urban sprawl, which means that houses in the city have tiny lots and tiny lawns. Outside of town it is fields. Grass is grown as a crop. You just don't see endless vistas of mown grass.

Another thing you see is elaborate masonry buildings in downtown areas, both commercial and government structures. And churches, big churches with huge spires. Even small towns will have 3 or 4 of these huge edifices.

Outside of the cities, traffic on the freeways is almost sparse. You drive for hours, okay a quarter of an hour, without running into a situation where you need to slow down. Highways fell into four categories:

1. Good, smooth roads.
2. Older concrete roads in good condition, but with the bump, bump, bump of expansion joints.
3. Roads in bad shape.
4. Roads under construction.

Good, smooth roads were slightly more prevalent than the others. The remainder were about equally divided between the other three types.

* I'm sure this is a quote from some movie, but I only found one reference that claimed it was from "Breakfast at Tiffany's", so I don't know.

Midwest Tour

I am back from two weeks in the Midwest. If this trip had a theme it was "failure to communicate". I talked to 50 or 60 different people I have not seen for a long time, not just old classmates, but relatives, inlaws and outlaws. I was able to communicate effectively with a few, but with most people it was like being in parallel universes, or being skew lines (lines that are not parallel and not in the same plane, or is that being redundant?). Perhaps as we get older, our character becomes more settled/established, we become less inclined to accommodate world views that differ from our own. Younger people are still absorbing information and have not established their own rules for what is acceptable and what is not. "What a long strange trip it's been".